"Will you please come and look at the sights?—or shall I go home?"
He looked up at her flashing face, and stuck to his seat.
"I say—Miss Laura—you don't know how you bowl a fellow over!"
The expression of his handsome countenance—so childish still through all its athlete's force—propitiated her. And yet she felt instinctively that his fancy for her no longer went so deep as it had once done.
Well!—she was glad; of course she was glad.
"Oh! you're not so very much to be pitied," she said; but her hand lighted a moment kindly and shyly on the young man's arm. "Now, if you wouldn't talk about these things, Hubert—do you know what I should be doing?—I should be asking you to do me a service."
His manner changed—became businesslike and mannish at once.
"Then you'll please sit down again—and tell me what it is," he said.
She obeyed. He crossed his knees, and listened.
But she had some difficulty in putting it. At last she said, looking away from him: